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If I were a Hall voter I'd never give that son of a b!tch one of mine. As the original sports union head, IMO Marvin Miller is the devil, and I hope that's who he shook hands with when he made it to the afterworld.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Landis, who was the most powerful man in baseball for decades, did incalculable damage to the game (and to America) by his enforcement of the race laws and his refusal to overturn the reserve clause in the Federal League lawsuit (back when he was still a federal judge).

I happen to believe that Marvin Miller, who was probably only second to Landis in his influence over the game for a long period, also did incalculable damage to baseball, by turning it from a reasonably-priced national pastime into a super-expensive luxury. But he certainly didn't do more damage than Landis did. So, if Landis is in the HOF, Miller should be as well.

My personal preference would be to keep Miller out of the HOF and kick Landis out too. But the owners will never kick Landis out. Thus, Miller should be in. Simple as that.

Has anyone ever been kicked out of the Hall? Of any Hall? I'm not exactly fond of Landis either, but any enshrinement seems to be permanent.

I would install Marvin Miller (and yes, I know he didn't want to go) over his influence on the game's history. So in that sense, I do have him in that Landis category. I just don't see him as an Ultimate Evil. There could have been other ways to do things. I don't think the owners would have listened to a single one of them. And the reserve clause had to die.

But, see, the reserve clause dated back to 1879 (!!), and it was always clear that it was illegal . . . until Judge Landis refused to rule in the antitrust suit brought by the Federal League against MLB back in 1915. (The NY courts had already refused to uphold it in cases dating back to the 1890s, but the law never mattered much to Judge Landis.) Then the Supreme Court foolishly upheld it in a derivative lawsuit, Federal Baseball Club v. National League (1922), holding that baseball did not constitute interstate commerce.

This decision should clearly have been obsolete once Wickard v. Filburn was decided (a moronic ruling, beloved by liberals, that held that growing wheat on your own farm for consumption by your own animals somehow constituted interstate commerce), but lower federal courts refused to touch it. Finallt, an arbitrator, Peter Seitz, declined to enforce it -- or baseball's supposed exemption from the antitrust laws because it wasn't interstate commerce.

And somehow we're supposed to credit Marvin Miller for this? Really? If anyone deserves credit, it's Peter Seitz, who found the courage to look at the emperor and tell him he had no clothes.

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